Two Commanders
by TeresaDelay
Summary: B/R one-shots about their relationship before and after Squire.  First chapter was a one-Shot for March Tamora Pierce Experiment Challenge, so different from the rest.
1. Chapter 1

For the March Competition of the Tamora Pierce Experiment: Writing Challenges. Requirements: Ten lines. First line has ten words, next 9, etc and must include either a baby, a kiss or death.

-------

He watched her sleep, wondering whether he should ask her.

He remembered the young girl he met years ago.

She hid her sadness behind an angry mask.

He watched her grow into a commander.

She forged a family of warriors.

Still, the bone-deep sadness lingered.

Death surrounded her family.

Death surrounded his.

"Marry me."

"Yes."

------------

Obviously this is very different from my usual long-winded self, but I thought it would be nice to try something new. Major thanks to KrisEleven and Sweet Sassy Sarah for starting up this competition.

I am currently on spring break. YAY! After I sleep for 24 hours expect an update to Zenobia and Gillyflowers (and maybe Pirates' Swoop if I can get the four chapters of Zenobia that I want to do this week done). I am considering doing a series of one-shots on Raoul and Buri, from when they are together and when they aren't, and this would be the intro to it. As much as I love my Jai, Raoul and Buri are awesome together. If you are interested, reply and let me know. I promise not to neglect Zenobia. I couldn't if I wanted to. That girl is demanding. She nags at me constantly to finish her story.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: **It all belongs to Tamora Pierce.

* * *

She falls asleep before him that first night together after the Midwinter ball, leaving him looking down at her and thinking about how much she had changed since he had first met her.

It took a solid year for her to stop looking like she didn't have enough to eat. He didn't know if her mourning kept her from eating, or if she really had had so little to eat in Saren. But he knew that she was too skinny when she first came to Tortall.

Thayet wore her grief elegantly. It was part of the fabric of her life, and she accepted her mother's sacrifice and continued gracefully forward. But Buri, Buri wore the burden of her family's death as though it was her own. As thought it were sandbags strapped across her shoulders and tied to every one of her limbs, dragging her down, dragging her back. As though she too had to die for her mistress.

Gradually, she opened up. She shook off the weight. Thayet marrying Jonathan helped. Suddenly, he and all of the Own were helping bear Buri's weight. She didn't have to watch out for Thayet on her own. She realized there were other options, that there was life beyond Saren and her past.

But before that, she seemed crushed. Her grief and her burden of care were so tied together, that if was impossible to say which affected her more. He'd noticed it even in the inn, and it made him want to seek her out, to give her a chance to be a teenager again rather than an embattled old guard.

They'd had their first conversation on the boat. Alanna had run out on them to puke over the side, and Raoul chuckled and told Buri to stay put. "Alan always—I mean Alanna always gets seasick. It's best to leave her alone."

"What was it like?" Buri asked. "Finding out your friend was a woman?"

"It was—" Raoul paused. He'd never really talked about this with anyone. After all, everyone else who mattered had already known before she'd been exposed to the whole court. "It was the single most confusing moment of my entire life, and then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly it all made sense. All of her peculiarities, Jon's sudden lack of interest in all Court women, George's winks, Gary's cursed veiled hints of surprises coming my way. I thought at first it meant I didn't know her, and then I realized that it didn't. She was the same person she'd always been."

Buri smiled at his response, and he realized he'd just passed some test he didn't know he'd been taking. She'd studied him in silence, making him uncomfortable, so he left her to have a drink with a sailor. Now as he watches her sleep, he wonders how the many years between then and now would have been different if he hadn't left her standing alone on the deck of that ship.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Let me know what you think. Should I do some more Buri/Raoul fics? I have another one already written, so if you ask me nice I'll post it! For some reason the pair of them are smooth writing for me at the moment, so even in the midst of finals I can probably churn out a few of them in the next week until I have time to update again on Zenobia. As always, please review!


	3. Chapter 3

He'd never noticed the difference in their size before. Perhaps that wasn't quite right. He knew he could pick her up as easy as breathing, and he knew he took up far more room in the bed than she, and he knew he had to either stoop down fairly far or hoist her up to kiss her. But she'd never seemed weak, or frail, or fragile compared to him. She'd never seemed small. But when he gently touched the bandage on her neck gently to make sure she hadn't started bleeding again, he was suddenly realized that her neck was tiny compared to his hand, that his forearm was nearly as long as her torso, that she was far smaller than the infirmary cots that he could never fit properly in.

"She'll be fine," Alanna said quietly. "She's healing up well. She'll be weak from the blood loss, and mad as a bear with a burr in it's tail, but she'll be her old self within a fortnight.

Raoul nodded mutely. "Will she wake up soon?"

"Probably, but she may sleep for another day or two yet. It'd be better if she did. She'll heal faster asleep than awake and squawking about wanting to get up and about."

"You're one to talk," Raoul said with a small.

"And so are you," Alanna patted his shoulder then moved on to the next patient in the row.

He'd eventually had to leave her side. Duty called. He was walking back towards the infirmary after conferring with Lord Wyldon about supplies when he heard her yelling and smiled.

He pulled open the door and walked down the orderly row to find Buri shouting at a terrified looking healer to bring her a shirt immediately, and he remembered why she never looked small to him.

"You know for a very small woman, you have a very big voice," he commented mildly, jerking his head at the healer, who happily went running the other direction.

Buri scowled at him, but scooted slightly to the side, making room for him to sit next to her on the cot.

"I'm big enough to take you," she replied.

He laughed and took his seat. "I'm not going to challenge you on that one. I have my pride, and it would be horribly wounded if defeated me in combat in front of my troops."

He kissed her then, gently, careful of the bandages.

"What happened?" she asked quietly.

"You don't remember?"

She shook her head.

"Maggot got his hands on some firebalm. It hit the wall next to you, tossed you off the ramparts and burned you pretty good. You also ended up with a nice chunk of the rampart in your neck and another in your leg. Lost what looked to me like a bucket of blood."

"Why don't I have a shirt on?"

"You had nasty burns on your stomach. Luckily Alanna was right there. She started healing you before the balm had even stopped burning, so the burns weren't as bad as they could have been. You blistered pretty nasty though, so Alanna put some kind of gel on it and then bandaged you. She didn't want a shirt sticking to the burns or the bandages."

"I'm sorry I scared you."

Raoul shook his head. "It's who we are."

Buri opened her mouth, then bit her lip.

"What?" he asked.

"After this war's over, I'm going to step down as Commander of the Riders," she finally said.

He looked at her, startled.

"I'm not going to stop fighting. I'll be like Thayet, going out some now and then, but this way I can go out when I want and where I want, and I can go out with the Own rather than the Riders if I want to."

He smiled, amused by all that she hadn't said. "Is this the part where I ask you to marry me?"

"I believe that's expected," she replied. "We should probably check with our friends who actually know about all this nonsense to be sure though."

He kissed her then. He probably should have said something about how much this meant to him, about how much he loved her, about how scared he was when he'd seen that explosion, about how it was the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life to turn forward again and continue his battle on the other side of the walls, thinking that she was dead or dying behind him, but that wasn't their way.

* * *

Review! Let me know if you want more B/R-ness. For those of you reading Zenobia, I'm working on an update now and should have one before the new year. I'm also mostly done with a Rosto/Beka chapter, so that may go up first.


End file.
